Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Film, Solaris, Contention
Sun giveth and taketh away. axehind writes: "This ZDNet article tells us StarOffice will no longer be free. The decision completes the transition of the StarOffice suite back to being a paid product, as it was when Sun bought the software along with its maker, Germany's Star Division, in 1999. Sun says it will stop free downloads of StarOffice 5.2 at midnight on Wednesday night."
On the other hand, The Pi-Guy writes: "It has been confirmed by Sun that Solaris 9 will be on Intel platforms - you can get it for free on DVD here. Quite surprising considering that a few months ago they were saying 'No S9 at all on x86!'"
Update: 05/29 03:03 GMT by T : As several readers have noticed, the page no longer indicates Solaris 9 once you've chosen x86 as your platform of choice -- looks like a case of mistaken identity.
Strong opinions tend to draw answers. Guillaume Laurent writes "Given that Murray mentions me in his interview, and that I disagree with most of what he says, I felt the need to reply. Enjoy."
Six seems a tad low. supafly613 writes: "Six people were arrested in South Africa over the weekend on suspicion of being involved in the infamous 'Nigerian' e-mail and letter fraud. Four of those detained were Nigerian, one was Cameroonian and the sixth was South African. Police in South Africa believe that the six are part of an international fraud and drug-dealing cartel, sending out thousands of e-mail and letters in an attempt to defraud."
Lost in cyberspace ... Mindphunk writes "Six hackers remain to be found so that Mozilla can be relicensed under the LGPL and GPL as well as the MPL original license. This is really important if Mozilla is going to interoperate readily with all kinds of free software. Perhaps the power of Slashdot can find them in time for the 1.0 release?? The missing hackers are:
- David Nebinger
- 'Uncle George'
- Sanjay Gupta
- Makoto Kato
- Thierry LeBouiland
- Jiwei Wang"
This is a followup to our earlier mention of the missing hackers.
Still waiting for NetBSD :) llordsmiff writes: "According to this, the world's first Xtender Xbox modchip preorders were shipped today (24 May). There are installation pictures also. "It plays back all import and backups on all worldwide sold Xbox machines." It's also supposed to play any DVD, regardless of region."
Wonder if this will be 'content protected.' neema writes: "Just a bit of an update to an older post, but Revolution OS will apparently be released on DVD (region free) in September for 20 dollars. Trailer and first 8 minutes can be found here. I, for one, welcome the chance to see it."
I've never tried Solaris (to my knowledge), but I'd love to. It's a good thing that I found the page where they give it away for free before it got posted on here on Slashdot. Now I might actually have a chance to get a copy ;). Thanks, [H]ardOCP!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Hmm. I looked at the sun link provided above, and it gives you 2 choices:
Solaris 9 for Sparc
Solaris 8 for Intel
Are you sure they're releasing 9 for intel?
FROM THE DESK OF: MR. WORGEE G. SHUB
Corporate (Special) Trust Fund,
United Political Parties of America,
Contract Award Committee,
Washington DC USA
Dear Esteemed Nigerian Sir:
I am the Chairman of the Contract Award committee and my committee is solely responsible for awarding and payment of contracts on behalf of the United Political Parties of America. My Committee has received payments from Enron, Microsoft, Walt Disney, and many other large American companies that we then disbursed in accordance with United States law to the intended politicians in return for government services rendered to The Corporations. We overshot the contracted sum by USD35 Million. We have paid the politicians and withholding the balance of Thirty-Five Million United States Dollars. Since the existing domestic laws forbid civil servants from opening, operating and maintaining foreign accounts, we do not have the expertise to transfer this balance of funds to a foreign account.
Due to the salubrious investment and taxation climate in Nigeria, as outlined in FMF A26 Unit 3B paragraph "D" of the Auditor General of the Federal Republic of Nigeria Report of NOV. 1999 about annual estimated petroleum revenues of 28billion US Dollars, and especially opportunities relateed to the late Head of State General Sani Abacha who died on 8th June 1998, which we have become aware of through various emails we have received from your countrymen about the supply of Agricultural Machines and spare parts to the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, we have prepared to pay a commission to a worthy individual like yourself equal to 25% of the total sum transfered while 5% will be reserved for incidental expenses that both parties will incur in the course of actualizing this transaction and the balance of 70% will be kept for the Committee members.
If you know you are capable of helping us actualize our life's dream, you should send to me immediately the details of your bank particulars or open a new account where we can transfer the money(US$35M)which you will hold in trust for us until we come over there for our own share.
As soon as you open the account, send by e-mail to me immediately the details of the account viz: Name of bank, address, routing number, telex number, Account number, Tel and Fax number.You should also include the name of your company, your personal address, Tel and Fax numbers for further communication.
Note that this transaction will be concluded within 10 working days from the day you give your consent.
Sincerely yours,
Worgee G. Shub
Chairman of Disbursements,
Corporate (Special) Trust Fund,
United Political Parties of America,
Contract Award Committee,
Washington DC USA
tel: 1-900-CON-4YOU
NOTE THAT FOR THE CONFIDENTIALITY OF THIS TRANSACTION, WHEN YOU CALL ME THE FIRST THING YOU DO IS FOR YOU TO ASK ME WHAT IS THE CODE, AND MY RESPONSE WILL BE (055).IF I DO NOT TELL YOU (055) THEN KNOW YOU ARE NOT
TALKING TO ME. DROP THE PHONE IMMEDIATELY AND CALL ME BACK TILL I GIVE YOU THE CODE WORD. THIS IS DUE TO JAMMING TELECOMMUNICATION DEVICES IN YOUR COUNTRY AS A RESULT OF THE BOMB EXPLOSION IN A LAGOS MILITARY BASE.
(Thanks to RobLimo)
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
So say I create an offshoot of Mozilla called Boozila, I can pick the LGPL license for this project, which means anyone who derives from my work must abide by the LGPL (or they can go use the original Mozilla source minus my changes and use GPL, or MPL..up to them!).
In essence, it gives developers a bit of a choice over which licenses they want to support while using the codebase...They are free to choose GPL, LGPL or MPL.
6 Mozilla hackers missing.... 6 People arrested for the 'Nigerian' email.
Juxtaposition saves the day.
Whoa, whoa, whoa there sonny. Did you say "Xtender"? You mean they're making the damned thing even bigger?
*sigh* Someone save me a spot in line at IKEA; I'm gonna need a larger entertainment center.
P.S. - I kid, I kid. I swear. I love my XBox. I'm actually dying to slot Morrowind in it... whenever that game gets around to releasing itself. =)
I juste tried to download the trailer of Revolution OS, and since I use Mozilla 1.0rc2 (yes, I know 1.0rc3 has been released) on Linux, I'm not able to view it. It seems to be offered in Real, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and Flash(?, probably for surfing the site and not the actual film). So I'm not sure who's targetted by this... but I know I'm not able to view it easily (could fire up Mplayer, but still need a copy of the actual file). Not very good for a film of this nature.
Anybody had more luck than me?
so the answer is no.
(This assumes the EULA hasn't changed since the time you didn't read it.
The info I got on the scam was that there is a definite Nigerian connection. A number of people duped in the scheme have gone off to meet people in Nigeria, some have disappeared entirely.
Scams of that sort are much easier to conduct in a country where laws are not exactly diligently enforced so Nigeria would be a much more likely base than the US. Compared to the Nigerian mafia Tony Soprano is a real small time player, all he has is a garbage business and a strip joint, in Nigeria they run the country.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
StarOffice may no longer be free but Open Office will remain free.
I think this is part of some master plan to conquer the problem of corporations who dont like free software because nobody is acountable.
Seems like a win-win situation - we get openoffice, corps get staroffice, microsoft get less sales.
Which is to say, by LGPL'ing your software, you are effectively dual licensing it with the GPL anyway(it's implied).
So, what's the point?
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
It would be better if they released it for region 2 only instead, at least for a while. People could then complain to them about how they can't view it in the USA. Then, they could make an official statement that they as the copyright holders do not mind if viewers in region 1 use any other player or process (including DeCSS) to play their own legitimately purchased DVDs.
Voilla! Now DeCSS has substantial non-infringing uses and since they have the explicit authorization of the copyright-holder, the DMCA can no longer be used against it.
Sure, it might cost them a few sales at the beginning. But the free press would more than make up for it when they quietly release region 1 disks a few months later.
This is a denial of service attack on the spammers:
If you get a lot of the Nigerian spam, here's a cute way to fight them. All it takes is two or more spams. Set your email client to forge the address of the first spammer and use that to reply to the second spammer, then switch addresses and reply to the first spammer. Make the replies good, but not identical. Tell them how excited/honor/glad/etc you are to help them in their important/meaningful/lucrative venture.
You will never see the result of this, but you can count on each spammer trying real hard to con the other spammer for at least a couple of messages back and forth (these guys really are tenacious, I've been baiting them regularly and sometimes they just don't give up unless you out and out call them con men).
This attack wastes there time and energy on their like-minded fellow con-men rather than on the suckers that are their true marks. If even 10% of the people who got Nigerian spam did something like this, they would be overwhelmed and crushed by the weight of their own greed.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.